Dumenko: It's not for State Ethnopolitics to count how many monks OCU has
Epifaniy resented the words of the State Ethnopolitics head, who'd voiced the meager number of his "monks", and stated the OCU wants to be in the Lavra at all costs.
Serhiy Dumenko reacted sharply to the words of the head of the State Ethnopolitics Olena Bohdan, who had previously reported the meager number of OCU “monks” in Kyiv. He expressed his indignation in a video interview with the Suspіlne channel.
“It is not the business of officials to comment on such things,” Dumenko said with resentment in response to a journalist’s request to comment on the words of Olena Bohdan that there are fewer monks in the OCU than in the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra alone. “Because sometimes it even looks strange that a person who is a sociologist begins to evaluate who has more people and who has less people. Because this is to a certain extent interference in the internal affairs of the church.”
Serhiy Dumenko said that the OCU would get into the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra no matter what: "It will happen; it is also an irreversible process." According to him, “our presence on the territory of the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra is being blocked at the moment.”
“The Lavra is big, and what we ask is to provide us with one of the temples, which is not currently used by the Moscow Patriarchate, so that we also indicate our presence in this great shrine,” Dumenko said and added that “there is an insane request from Ukrainian society” for this.
Recall that earlier the head of the State Ethnic Policy, Olena Bogdan, said that more than 200 monks of the UOC live in the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra alone, with less than 50 monks in the structure of the OCU for the whole of Kyiv. In the context of a conversation about the possible transfer of the Lavra to the OCU, Olena Bohdan actually said that this issue is irrelevant for the Dumenko structure, since there are no people there to populate it. At the same time, she noted that there are enough churches in the OCU, and they are not overcrowded.
